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We posted last year about predictions of wage and hour claims involving employees' off-the-clock use of e-mail and cell phones. As a recent Wall Street Journal article notes, that prediction has come to fruition (note the irony in a cellular company being one of the defendants):

Last month, three current and former employees sued T-Mobile USA
Inc., claiming they were required to use company-issued smart phones to
respond to work messages after hours without pay.In
a March suit, a former CB Richard Ellis Group Inc. maintenance worker
seeks pay for time spent after hours receiving and responding to
messages on a work-issued cellphone. . . .

The federal Fair Labor Standards Act says employees must be paid for
work performed off the clock, even if the work was voluntary. When the
law was passed in 1938, "work" was easy to define for hourly employees,
said [Dan McCoy, an employment lawyer and partner at Fenwick & West LLP]. As the workplace changed, so did the rules for when
workers should be paid. Subsequent court decisions have interpreted the law to require some
hourly employees to be paid for putting on and taking off work
uniforms, like police gear, and for time spent while booting up
computers, said Audrey Mross, a partner and head of the labor and
employment division at Munck Carter LLP in Dallas. . . .

With smart phones, which typically provide Internet access and email
as well as voice calling, "the boundaries become much more permeable"
and work is difficult to monitor, said Christina Banks, a senior
lecturer at the University of California Berkeley and president of
Lamorinda Consulting LLC. The use of pagers once raised similar issues. The Labor Department
has said that workers generally don't have to be paid for carrying
pagers, unless they get buzzed so often they can't use on-call time for
"personal pursuits." . . .

The current and former T-Mobile employees say they were required to
use company-issued smart phones to respond to work-related messages,
including customer complaints, after hours without pay. When the
workers reported the hours to management of the cellphone company, the
lawsuit says, the employees were told nothing could be done and they
should expect to work extra hours as part of T-Mobile's "standard
business practices." . . .

In the CB Richard Ellis case, filed in U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Wisconsin, John Rulli, a former maintenance worker
for the commercial real-estate services company in Muskego, Wis., said
he wasn't paid for after-hours time spent receiving and responding to
messages on his cellphone. In the suit, Mr. Rulli said he was handcuffed to his phone because
the company required him to quickly respond to messages at any hour.